Daniel Akst

Author, columnist, critic. @WSJ weekend news quiz. Editor and publisher @tivolibooks.

[Daniel Akst @danakst]

David Hockney, a Trans-Atlantic Titan of Art, Dies at 88 https://t.co/TMjBVzTYkq

[Daniel Akst @danakst]

I would add that the refereeing has been scandalously biased towards San Antonio, whose dirty play has gone unpunished.

[Daniel Akst @danakst]

I really wanna see these Knicks in the Canyon of Heroes. Not just their play but their heart and their comportment are deserving. What a game.

[The Free Press @TheFP]

In a recent essay, Sam Harris explains why engaging with critics who single out Israel as the world’s foremost villain while ignoring the realities of its jihadist enemies is a futile exercise. As Jonathan Swift observed, “You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.”

[Bob Elder @southernphd]

I never met Gordon Wood, but I have a story about him.

In one of my grad school seminars, we read Wood’s Creation of the American Republic. The sheer erudition and evidentiary depth of the book bowled me over.

Back then, before kids and before life accelerated to warp speed, I used to call my mother every Sunday to catch up. Lots of times, we ended up talking about what I was reading that week in my grad seminars or for leisure. Mom had an omnivorous mind, and she was always looking for something else to read. She was a true intellectual—curious about almost everything, always eager to integrate new arguments or ideas into her existing schemas of how the world worked or to have those schemas challenged and changed.

When we talked that particular Sunday, I think I tried to describe to her part of Wood’s argument about the relationship between the state constitutions during the Articles of Confederation era and the federal Constitution. Maybe I was tired, maybe I didn’t completely understand her questions, but the end result of the conversation was that Mom had questions about Wood’s argument that I didn’t answer satisfactorily. I told her that she should probably just read the book, and we said goodbye.

She did eventually read the book, but the next Sunday, Mom started our conversation by saying, “Well, I had a lovely conversation with Gordon Wood this week.” For a split second, I thought she was joking, but then I remembered who I was dealing with. I started to sweat. “How?” I asked. A whole variety of unlikely scenarios in which the foremost historian of the American Revolution and my mother, who lived in Wichita, Kansas, might have met ran through my mind. “Oh, I just looked up his office phone number on Brown’s website and called, and he picked up!” Mom said. I decided I would have to find another profession.

As it ended up, Gordon Wood spent about an hour on the phone with my mother answering her questions about the Constitution. Ever since, I’ve had a soft spot for the man when I imagine him picking up the phone in Providence and finding Becky Elder from Wichita on the other end of the line. His generosity in that moment spoke very well of him.

Rest in peace, professor.

[The Culturist @the_culturist_]

Highly recommend reading this:

[Daniel Akst @danakst]

@kearney_melissa In some arenas the truth is so obvious yet so taboo that when it appears unvarnished in this way I feel the need to shade my eyes, as if after so much darkness it might damage the retinas.

[Saganism @Saganismm]

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

[Kyle Smith @rkylesmith]

https://t.co/BnZjC0mXJf

[Melissa S. Kearney @kearney_melissa]

Ha! But yes -
“This is the tendency of academic writing in the humanities (and to a lesser extent, the social sciences) to adopt an extensive abstract jargon, often borrowed from philosophy and sometimes even from the sciences, the result of which is prose that has the superficial form of scholarship but which in fact verges on a kind of nonsense.”

[Melissa S. Kearney @kearney_melissa]

Wow.
“In the most extreme cases (e.g., anthropology), we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.”

[Nicholas Freedman @ShockedNick]

Temple Albert, New Mexico's largest synagogue, was attacked last night, along with the nearby JCC.

Nobody was hurt, and the suspect is in custody. Federal law enforcement is involved.

There is no news coverage; not local, not national. Zero. Zilch.

[NBA Courtside @NBA__Courtside]

Jay Willams says Jalen Brunson is the antithesis of what fanbases think about the NBA right now:

“He’s the antithesis. Well, guys are overpaid, he’s not overpaid. You think about other things teams are tanking, they didn’t tank they built it the right way, they built the right culture around that. Load management, when is he load managing? “Oh I hurt my pinky toe I can’t play.” This dude hurts his knee, he hurts his ankle, he comes back in and he closes a game down the stretch. You tell me this guy at 6’1, 6’2 isn’t the most likable player in the NBA right now, how do you root against a guy like that.”

[Eli Neuberger @thevoos]

Yesterday I was with my son at a 7/11 minding our own business and buying snacks , another customer , a women that looked to be about 40 something with two teenage kids decides to let loose with a string of expletives and multiple “ Heil Hitlers “ towards us .

[Daniel Akst @danakst]

NYC straphanger targets subway rider with antisemitic remarks: 'Jews are eating kids' https://t.co/vaQ3BlAARM

[Daniel Akst @danakst]

If you are in the mood for a hurricane of bullshit accompanied by heatstroke, you're in luck. Graduation season is upon us.

[Peter Savodnik @petersavodnik]

The remarkable thing about this is how widespread it is. It happens on campus, online, at work, at dinner parties and potluck dinners and school drop-off and school pick-up and on and on. All of these unhappy interactions amount to the same surreality, the same lie: We have no problem with Jews, just Zionists.

If one protests, if one says, This is the same distinction that Jews have been asked to make over the many centuries -- we have no problem with your Jewishness, just this core part of it -- one is inevitably met with the unthinking, "Genocide!" There's no point in getting into that debate, because it is now religion among so-called progressives. One has to embrace the belief that the Jews are guilty of the worst of all possible crimes, and if you do not believe it, if you do not declare your support vociferously and unequivocally, you'll be excommunicated from polite society. Ghettoized.

The contemporary "left" is simply reenacting the hatreds, the myopias, the violence, of all the antisemites who came before. It imagines itself, arrogantly, ignorantly, transcending the past. It is, in fact, a slave to it.

[Lenore Skenazy @FreeRangeKids]

Friend won't let kids 10 & 12 walk 2 blocks in quiet suburb because "they could be taken."

This is almost like believing in witches.

Murder rate today is lower than 1960s, yet people are scared out of their minds. Treat tweens like 2-year-olds.

Sometimes I'm at my wit's end.

[Casey Babb @DrCaseyBabb]

In Toronto, a young Jewish girl named Esther has been missing for over a week. To make matters worse, people have been ripping down posters about her disappearance, just like they did with the hostage posters after 10/7—one of the more appalling things I've ever seen in my life.

[Daniel Akst @danakst]

Somehow I missed this from the great Neglected Books blog. https://t.co/HzB2A78jL1